27 Day Karma Free Writing Prompts - Honorarium

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Friday, April 9, 2010

Day #21 - Theme: "What we eat off of ... "

#21. Theme: "What we eat off of ... "
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6 comments:

  1. Janet MaykusApril 9, 2010 at 7:41 AM

    Daddy had an egg plate.

    I don't know why I called it that. i don't know if anyone else did. But I thought of it as the egg plate.

    He used it in the mornings when he had his two sunnyside up half raw fried eggs. He got tempermental if his yolks broke.

    Sometimes he had a special breakfast on his egg plate. Those two eggs, friend liver, cottage cheese and Brer Rabbit syrup. All of this was piled on top of the other. He smothered it all with salt.

    The egg plate was pretty. It had the remnants of a silver leaf on the edge. There were bright pastel flowers on it. They were the colors of sweet peas but they were not sweet peas. They were in the shape of pansies but they weren't pansies. Maybe they weren't real flowers, but the flowers of the designer's mind.

    This one plate was the most beautiful plate in the world. The silver was exotic and precious. The flowers were sublime.

    I never knew where that plate came from or why we just had one or why that was the plate that daddy always ate on.

    I recalled it as fine china. I found a set Wednesday at a junk store. Eleven plates for ten dollars. They all still had their silver rims.

    I didn't buy them.

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  2. Skull SwingerApril 9, 2010 at 2:27 PM

    I ate of her, ate off her, ate her whole.

    In the highchair -king of the iron high chair, “Feed me,” was my only language. I ate off the porch on my rocking horse, blanket, plastic bear in hand, sister now in chair.
    I ate in hotel rooms.

    I ate from the dirt in the backyard.

    I ate off the wagon.

    I ate out of your hand.

    I ate off stunning serving ware in France, Greece, Spain, Israel, Bahrain, Italy but not Turkey.

    I ate out of your mouth…Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Dulce De Leche by Haggen Dazs.

    I recall stacks of bright colored plastic bowls & plates with spaghetti, meatballs, tuna casseroles, goulash, stuffed peppers, liver and onions, Lucky Charms, Lipton cup-a-soup, potatoes, meats, pickles, beets, Pop Tart’s and other candy colored treats. Lots of bright colored plastic cups with Koolaid, lemonaid, milk, ice cream floats, water and pop.

    “Have anything you want!”

    “I’m having shrimp.”

    “--The hell you are?! What are you goddamn nuts?!”

    “But you said, whatever I--“

    “Order anything else!”

    I ate pizza off paper plates 3 times a day as a kid in Seaside Heights, I ate crullers in the morning from Wyckoff’s, and crabs at night from the bay. We caught those crabbing crabs in the early morning, caught in cages with fish heads and turkey necks, put in bushel baskets. In the dark bay sat our little dingy…with those crabs running nuts at our tiny toes.

    -Ate steak and lobster for a couple nights in the Persian Gulf with Captains and ranked officers. And a few weeks before that, I shared a thanksgiving meal off a metal tray on a shiny ship off Naples with 1000 others.

    -I took notice in the fine blue detail of a particular piece of late 1800’s Stone China; it was a dinner plate that a few of us smoked hash on.

    -We eat off the Mikasa we got from our nuptials…It’s our daily dishware. And the 1960’s dinner set given to us. Thank God for Replacements LTD.

    Burning with sunlight to this day from an eight course banquet; fresh succulent mango in a puddle of Indian oil with ginger… served off the back of her knees.

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  3. Janet MaykusApril 9, 2010 at 5:31 PM

    Dang....served off the back of her knees...makes me swoon!!!!

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  4. UnknownApril 10, 2010 at 11:16 AM

    Inkydinky: love the descriptiveness, especially the "special breakfast."

    SkullSwinger: a whole life captured so brilliantly. The Seaside Heights scene is a story in its own. "Crullers" brings alive a whole time and place and treats.

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  5. UnknownApril 10, 2010 at 11:19 AM

    The hamburgers are so greasy and loaded with ketchup that it all seeps through the paper plate.

    "Mum, my plate disintegrated and my hands are all gunked up."

    "Wipe them on your pants," I say in my authoritative mother voice.

    The boy looks up. "Really? Really wipe my hands on my pants?"

    "Sure and if you want you can lick your hands like a dog first."

    "I love being at camp, Mum."

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  6. sbarrysApril 14, 2010 at 11:35 PM

    TV dinners. Tin foil. Where am I? In some random living room somewhere, it could be anywhere. It means mom ain't got time to cook, dad is off drinking and playing pool or poker or all three, and grandpa and grandma decided to take us in for the night or my sis and I decided to cook for ourselves at whatever apartment or pseudo apartment slash shack we're calling home. C'mon, twelve-year-olds can at least heat TV dinners? How hard is that? The tin foil makes your fillings tingle. Always preferred to eat TV dins with a plastic fork or spoon. Don't have to do any dishes. Maybe it's why I like airplane food and craft services and cafeteria food at Plasencia Elementary over in Echo Park. Hell, maybe it's why I don't like food, don't have much of an appetite and once in a while pop into Denny's to have a grand slam breakfast. Two pancakes, two eggs (over easy, thank you very much), two sausage links and two bacon strips and an angioplasty on the side. Sometimes I wonder how the hell I ever escaped the country and the shanty houses and the bad food and the swearing and drinking and general underbelly living. I mean, would it have killed one of the so-called adults to go out and get a frickin' job that paid better than minimum wage. Step-dad was the only one who ever graduated college and he decided he'd rather play his guitar on the sidewalk in the Haight. Jesus, you people, put in a good day's work, then come home, "Honey, etcetera, etcetera," and cook your kids a meal on the stove, in the oven, and put it on a nice white restaurant plate, good silver, napkins all around. You know, civilized. And FYI, TV dinners ain't civilized despite how good the little squares of peach cobble taste. Yum.

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